irc

irc is an old text-based internet chat system that still gets used by many projects.

irssi is a good client for irc. You can find out how to set it up, including how to configure it to automatically connect to servers and channels here .

It’s best to run irssi in a GNU screen session on a remote server and then connect to that when you want to chat. This allows you to keep track of conversations in channels even when you are not online. Here’s a script to do this. Save it as irc somewhere on your PATH (e.g. in the bin directory in your HOME), chmod +x it, and then it’s easy.